Month: August 2022

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A seven-year old in Arizona brought guns and ammunition to school the other day. The case is still being investigated but it looks like the only person who is going to get punished is the seven year old. Yes, the boy is getting the book thrown at him while the parents, apparently, are going to walk away scot free. As what happened is still under investigation, this may be the correct decision.

No matter how the investigation turns out this is a troubling incident because is yet another incident of a child getting a gun. If it turns out to be the parent’s unsecured gun then I think the parents need to explain how their child was able to get the gun, smuggled it into his backpack and bring it to school. They are both responsible for the gun and for the child. If they were negligent, they should be prosecuted. If the child obtained the gun from another person other than his parents, then that person is responsible. Rights carry with them responsibilities. If adults are not upholding their responsibilities to the community, then the law must intercede.

I find situations where underage children obtain guns and then accidentally kill themselves or someone else the most unforgivable of crimes. Of course, it is also devastatingly sad. Nobody wanted this to happen. Because of loss of a child is so horrible, there is this tendency to forgive the adult involved because they have suffered enough. What good is sending them to jail going to do when they are already beating themselves up worse than any court can ever do. I get that. I just don’t know what to do then. If parents can’t secure their guns to protect their own children, what can we, as a society, do to encourage them. Right now, all I have is a stiff fine and/or a jail sentence.

But let us also be clear, a child getting a gun is not an accident, it is negligence and criminal negligence needs to be addressed, if for no other reason it is an example for other adults with unsecured guns and children.

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Should somebody be allowed to say anything they want even if it is offensive to other people in the community or, more importantly, is offensive to people within a hearing distance of the speech? I am Free Speech absolutist. Say whatever you want. There is, however, a down side to speaking your mind freely. Someone who hears you is free to think you are an asshole. If they think you are an asshole, they can boycott your business and encourage others to boycott your business as well. I am perfectly fine with Free Speech practiced in this way.

A lot of Free Speech advocates are critical of what they see as Cancel Culture. They think that they can say anything about Trans People, as an example, without consequence. They think that good people just speaking their mind are losing jobs because Cancel Culture advocates disagrees with what they are saying and fight back. So what? What is wrong with trying to stop someone who disagrees with you. It certainly is their right to disagree and to organize against you.

But, then, Cancel Culture is stifling free speech. Only if you agree to shut up about it. This is what is so great about Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais. They continue to speak their minds freely even though there are people who passionately disagree with them. So far, both comedians are still in business even though they are being heavily criticized for what they are saying. Now, if you think that what you are saying is going to stop people from attending your shows or hiring you at comedy clubs, you are at choice. Stop saying what you are saying or continue to face the wrath. But, I’m afraid, you are also a really a bad advocate of Free Speech because you don’t like what people are saying about you because you practiced your right to Free Speech. That’s just not the way Free Speech works. Free Speech means saying what you want even though you know you are going to make people angry and still deciding to say it anyway. Complaining about Cancel Culture, however, makes you look incredibly lame.

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Nancy Davis wanted the baby she was expecting. Then she discovered her baby would either die in her womb or die soon after birth because the fetus didn’t have a skull. She decided to abort but, unfortunately she lives in Louisiana which restricts abortion access. Because the law was vaguely written, the doctors at her hospital were confused whether an abortion would be legal in this case. The hospital opted to tell Davis she needed to go to another state where the procedure was legal.

A 16 year girl in Florida wants to get an abortion so she can continue her education. Since she is 16 and parentless, she had to go to the Florida courts to determine whether she could. The judge decided against her — saying she was too immature to make such a decision. Yes. You heard it right. The girl is too immature to make a decision to abort but is mature enough to take over full time care of a baby.

This is a horror story for a variety of reasons.

  1. The woman’s choice is overruled by lawyers and judges. The court can make a decision that ignores her wishes completely.
  2. Doctors aren’t going to risk their careers by breaking the law. If they are afraid to act, they won’t. This could create a deadly medical crisis for the woman in an emergency situation.
  3. The law creates needless delays in treatment while a lawyer or a judge is consulted. This is especially important in states where there are more stringent time restrictions for abortions. The clock is ticking on her access and any delay could cause her to miss this deadline.
  4. Poor women are in a particular bind. They may not have access to lawyers and may have trouble coming up for both an abortion and the travel to Pro-choice state. She will have fairly grim choices — waiting for the fetus dies in her or to be born dead, get an illegal abortion or spend money she doesn’t have to travel to a state where she can get an abortion.
  5. The ability to travel to Pro-choice states makes abortion restrictions meaningless. All that you are doing is making abortion inconvenient for those who can afford to travel.
  6. The state is making an already difficult circumstance even worse for the woman. Instead of getting the abortion where she lives, working with the medical professionals she is familiar with, and going to back to her home after the procedure, she has to figure out where abortion is legal, find a doctor to perform the abortion, travel hundreds of miles away from home to get it. All this additional stress just so the state doesn’t have the abortion performed within its boundaries.

Who actually benefits from any of this? Certainly not the pregnant woman. The state has taken away her power of choice so that the state can act as if they are morally superior to the mother. In the meantime, most women will slip off to another state, or obtain an illegal abortion, or quietly slip into poverty with a child now in tow.

What a mess.

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Of course, that’s what everyone wants and, without any effort from anyone, over 90% of the children will eventually turn out that way. They won’t read books. No one will guide them to heterosexuality. Somewhere around 13, nature will take over and a heterosexual child will appear. The process just sort of happens without anyone doing anything.

The path to homosexuality or trans identification is much the same experience however a lot of people don’t believe that. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of the children will find themselves liking the same sex or not wanting to be the gender nature assigned them. But, since so few children end up with these different identifications, a lot of people are suspicious on how the child turned out different. They think that some adult has interfered with the child and nature to create this difference.

Science is still searching for a reason why most 13 year old boys wake up one day wanting to see pictures of naked women and another, much smaller percentage, wants to see pictures of naked men. There is no answer why but there is a great deal of suspicion that the child has somehow been tampered with and needs fixing. This becomes the problem for the child. Parents and religious leaders reject that the child has somehow freely became interested in this minority sexual identification. How can an innocent child know about homosexuality or transsexual identification?

How does a young boy know to be interested in naked women? Nobody tells children to be interested in the opposite sex either. It happens though and nobody notices because that’s what people are expecting. It doesn’t even come off as sexual to anyone. It is the normal process of boys and girls realizing who they are. Isn’t it sweet, Johnny is playing the Dad, and Suzy is play the Mom. Those little scamps Johnny and Suzy are playing doctor. This little game of children playing with heterosexual identification goes on without mention or worry.

It is only when Johnny wants to dress up as a woman that things get messy. Why would he want to that? Who could have given him that idea? The thinking here is that there is no way a child could think outside of normal heterosexual behavior on their own. So now instead of continuing to help these kids who think differently, the focus switches to who is grooming them to have such outrageous ideas.

What is to be done? First, and I can’t say this enough, most children are on the heterosexual track. There is no way that gay and trans friendly teachers or books changes this. I mean why would a child choose a Gay or a Trans sexual identification when heterosexual identification is more socially accepted and just as sexually pleasurable. There is no advantage in abandoning heterosexuality for homosexuality. Protecting the straight child is beside the point and meaningless. They are going to be just fine. The lesson they could learn from all this is that there are people who have different sexual identifications and that these people are just as worthy of respect as they are.

But protecting the different child is important because they are in an incredibly vulnerable position. They may not have parents who they are able to talk with. Other kids may be bullying them. They are confused about why they are different from most other children. No amount of heterosexual grooming is going to turn them around. The past three thousand years tells us this is true. Children have been guided to the only acceptable sexual identification — heterosexuality and still, despite all of the of the negative repercussions of homosexuality, still choose being gay. They choose homosexuality even if there are heavy legal and social penalties for being gay or trans. They choose it even if they loose the love and protection of family and friends. They choose it sometimes even if they are faced with death. It has nothing to do with grooming.

If grooming becomes the concern then the different child will be abandoned. Grooming encourages parents to go after the groomer and ignore the child who couldn’t possibly becoming up with these strange sexual ideas on their own. They look for someone to blame instead of helping their child through a difficult time. They might try to make their child normal with torturous psychiatric procedures instead of finding the best way to accept his difference. How is the child supposed to view their differences if people don’t want to talk about it, don’t want any teacher or book to deal with the subject? I am is so horrible that people can’t even talk about it. What is a straight child going to think of these differences that can not be discussed in school? If people can’t talk about these differences, how is he supposed to know that it is all right for people to be different, that anybody different deserves respect even though they think differently about sex?

The goal of the schools should be about making more understanding heterosexual kids and protecting the Gay, Lesbian, and Trans kids from abuse and bullying. But lets be clear no one knows how to create heterosexual children or homosexual children for that matter. It happens without any grooming or guidance from anyone. Stopping teachers from talking about it or banning books that might explain it isn’t going to to stop children from choosing differently. It might, however, cause them to look outside the school for help and there they might actually encounter a groomer or a pedophile. Is that really what we want?

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Oakland Athletic’s outfielder Skye Bolt apparently got sick during a baseball game the other day.

However, why this is worth precious new’s space is baffling. There is no news there. He barfed. It isn’t funny. It didn’t impact the game. There was no daring rescue to get him off the field. The poor man quite simply barfed and walked off the field afterwards. This is not news.

But, for some reason, it is making the news. Whenever the news media complains about they are just doing their jobs and they are under attack for reporting the facts, I always think of instances like this. Yes, true enough this happened. In a world of billions of people, someone is going to be barfing. There is probably someone barfing this very moment. Why is this man barfing important to me?

The media has surrendered their lofty perch when they opted to reporting the sensational. They have a lot of discretion on what appears in their papers and in their news programs. Apparently vomiting athletes brings in viewers who want to see the gory details. Sadly it says a lot about their audience and it demeans journalism that they can’t restrain their lust for ad revenue to feed their audiences prurient interest.

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I lost faith in journalism during the 2016 election. The press likes controversy. It likes big personalities. it likes people who will say crazy things. Who better to provide those things than Donald Trump? Trump is a headline waiting to happen. The press dutifully gave him everything he wanted.

The press portray themselves as innocent in all this. They simply report the facts and leave it to the reader to decide. But this isn’t the way things work. Supplying the world with facts is important but the press really needs to sell advertisements. This means they need to show their potential customers their media outlet has a large customer base. This is the only thing that truly matters to the press. So while, they do print facts, they have a lot of discretion on what facts appear in the headlines and at the top of the hour. If it is likely to grab the audience’s attention, that particular fact has a better chance of seeing the light of day. All Trump had to do in 2016 is to say something crazy and the press aimed their laser like gaze on Donald Trump.

This was particularly true during the Republican Primary where the press couldn’t look away from Trump. Keep in mind, there was well over 10 candidates running for the Republican nomination in 2016. Governors, Senators, Business Leaders but the press ignored them because Donald Trump said crazier things which made for better news which meant more customers watching. All Trump had to do was call a press conference. The full press contingent showed up so they could duly report the facts. Trump received so much press coverage that he spent very little of his own money buying advertisements. He didn’t need ads, he had the press right in his pocket. They provided all the advertising he needed. The other poor saps couldn’t compete with the media savvy Trump.

This love affair continued after he was elected. It was Trump Trump Trump for four long years. Any crazy thing he said was put in the headlines, investigated and discussed endlessly by everyone in the press. While this was all going on, Trump’s allies were doing real damage to environmental and ecological regulation, replacing judges with hardcore conservative ones, giving tax breaks to their pals and undermining any government department they could wreak havoc with. The press, however, couldn’t take their eyes off of the very entertaining Trump and his headline grabbing antics.

So, here we are two years after removing Trump from the presidency and what is the press doing — putting him in the headlines every single day. This raid on his home is ridiculous. The only thing the press can do is speculate. Hour after hour of speculation. How is this valuable? The only facts they can report is that is happened and that Trump and a lot of Republicans are pissed off about it. There isn’t much else to say, at least that is a fact. It certainly doesn’t warrant the coverage Trump is getting and the only person that can be happy about all the attention he is getting is Trump.

And, of course, the press is loving it too. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. They love Trump. It isn’t a healthy love. It is very much a sick co-dependent love. But when Trump speaks, they will be right there reporting. What actual reporting can be done about Mar-a-lago? The press even admits that they don’t know anything yet. They keep saying we will have to wait to know what the raid was about. Why not wait then? But they kept help themselves. Instead, our best and brightest reporters are speculating about what the Mar-a-lago raid means, how it will affect Trump and what Garland might be thinking.

The net effect of this is it gives Trump all the attention he craves. He is a narcissist. He doesn’t care if the press is unfavorable to him, he just wants to be talked about. The press is co-operating with him in spades. Trump is Moby Dick and the press is Captain Ahab. They won’t give up until they put him in prison. Trump is 76 years old. He can drag this on for years and still die in the comfort of his own home. It isn’t going to happen. They also want Trump true believers to admit they were wrong and Trump is a bad man. This isn’t going to happen either. They want to prevent him from running for president in 2024. This could happen but the present strategy is putting Trump in the headlines again and he is loving it and the people who love Trump are back at his beck and call. The very things that propelled him to the White House in2016.

If nothing else, taking Trump off the front page would stop this co-dependent relationship. The press doesn’t have to play Trump’s game. It would require a lot of discipline and, sadly, it doesn’t look like the press understands or even cares to learn the lesson as long as Trump sells advertising.

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My friend Ted passed this link to me as, I suspect, he thought it would rile me. It did. It was a problem sent to advice columnist where the columnist and her readers decide who the biggest assholes are in a specific situation. The problem was a vegetarian was attending a wedding and she told the bride that she wouldn’t be able to sit at a table where meat was served. What is a bride and groom to do? They settled for a solution that made nobody happy. They set up a vegetarian table so the only one at the squeamish vegetarian’s table were fellow vegetarians. The squeamish vegetarian didn’t like it, the other vegetarians didn’t like it, and the mother of the bride didn’t like it. WTF.

First, let me talk about the squeamish vegetarian. She should have never broached the subject in the first place. The bride had a vegetarian dish. The bride graciously assured her that she would have something to eat. But no, this wasn’t enough. She couldn’t sit at a table where meat was served. What exactly did she want the bride to do? Make everyone at the table eat the vegetarian dish because she was squeamish? The bride and groom came up with a solution — an admittedly bad one but it was the only workable one I could see — she put all of the vegetarians at one table. This should have ended the discussion but, of course, people being people, complained about that including the squeamish vegetarian. Really? You are going to complain about the only plausible solution the couple had to your demand. Sorry, but it is now time for the squeamish vegetarian to shut her mouth.

Then there is the bride and groom. They should have told her from the get go that while they know it will be difficult for her that they don’t see any way to accommodate her request without splitting up families which they are trying to avoid. Making sure she understands that they want her to attend but that they simply can’t guarantee her that everyone at her table won’t eat meat. It would then be up to the squeamish vegetarian to make up her mind on her next step.

Then the mother of the bride and the other vegetarians complaining that it was discrimination to put the vegetarians at one table. Come on. Seating people at a wedding is a Hellish job, someone always is going to be unhappy about their seating. Someone also has to sit next to boorish cousin Ralph too. This wedding you may have pulled the short straw. Get over it. It is an hour dinner. Once the plates are cleared, people usually move around from table to table, talking to other guests. No one much cares about the seating chart anymore. You will survive this experience.

What bothers me most about this incident is the notion that something so petty as where you are sitting at a dinner reception warrants a complaint to the bride and the groom. I should take time from my life in order that you aren’t exposed to meat. I should sit at a table with my family and friends and not be at a table full of strangers. If you don’t accommodate me, you are wrong, you are discriminating against me. These are, at worst, minor annoyances that people experience every day. Generally the appropriate behavior is to suck it up and move on without even thinking about again. To escalate them to complaints in a middle of a person’s wedding reception is childish and unnecessary. What is supposed to happen? Is the already busy bride and groom supposed to stop everything, look at the seating chart, make the changes you want so you will be happy for the one hour it takes to eat dinner? I suggest growing up because in this way you will get more pleasure out of the wedding and the bride and groom will be spared having to solve petty problems in the middle of their reception.

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I think everyone knows Alex Jones is a heartless asshole but if you needed more proof click to this link

He lost a law suit with Sandy Hook parents and he is trying to avoid paying them by declaring bankruptcy.

These are the Sandy Hook parents who lost their 7 year old children in one of the most horrible mass shootings that has occurred in this country. He promoted a conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was a false flag operation to create opposition to the 2nd Amendment. The shooting didn’t happen, no children died, and the parents are lying about the whole thing.

Imagine, you lost your child in a senseless shooting and now some asshole is saying you lied about the whole thing. Jones is picking a fight with people who lost their children in this massacre. What kind of man does that? But clearly Jones is unencumbered by even the remotest feelings of human decency. He keeps picking at these people’s wounds.

His theory is so cockamamie that it defies belief. He claims that a large group of people who witnessed the shooting are conspiring to subvert the 2nd Amendment. If so, this is the most masterful display of deception ever to be performed. The parents are lying about losing their children. The police are lying about the bodies they found. The staff and children who survived the horror are lying about what they witnessed, the EMT staff who removed the bodies from the school are lying. The hospital staff who treated the wounds are lying. The funeral home staff who prepared the bodies for burial are lying. All of these people are lying about what happened. It was all a trick. Jones is asking us to ignore the testimonies of all of these people who were in Sandy Hook that day. Instead, Jones wants you to believe people who weren’t even in Sandy Hook. People who are scouring evidence, looking for minor holes and claiming these inconsistencies prove a false flag operation and thus didn’t happen.

To make matters worse for these parents, there are people crazy enough to believe Jones. These people are so persistent in their harassment of the Sandy Hook parents that now the parents are frightened for their lives. The amount of unnecessary pain that these poor people have experienced is beyond the pale.

And, when you think Alex Jones couldn’t go any lower in the cesspool he is swimming in, he dives even deeper. He now cheerfully wants to stiff the parents of the settlement they won in court.

That this reprehensible creature still is broadcasting should give one pause.

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Bob has gotten COVID for the third time. The thing is in the old days, say July 2020, I knew exactly what to do. But I am not sure they apply anymore. We both had 4 COVID vaccine shots. We are up-to-date. So Bob is supposed to self-isolate? He is perfectly willing to not see anyone but to stay locked up in his room is a chore and I, frankly, don’t see the point anymore. I don’t want to get sick. On the other hand, we are both fully vaccinated and boosted. We have taken some self-isolating precautions but we are eating together and we are watching TV together. I am not terrified about getting COVID am I fairly confident that I have done everything I can to ensure that I will survive any bout with COVID. Isn’t that what the vaccination was all about? Give us the ability to move on with our lives without fear. Well, it has worked.

Also confusing is I am testing negative for COVID. A year ago, I would have self-isolated as well because I live with someone who tested positive. This doesn’t make sense to me anymore. I live in a highly vaccinated county (75% of the county is vaccinated), in the most vulnerable population of over 65 year olds the vaccination rate is well over 90 percent, and for people over the age of 80 the vaccination rate is close to 99%. So there is a small group of unvaccinated people, and most of them are not in a vulnerable population. I feel comfortable going out if I wear a mask. The unvaccinated know the risks. They have had ample time to get vaccinated. They decided against it. Since people are either vaccinated or have accepted the risks of being non-vaccinated, why should I, as a COVID negative fully vaccinated person, sit at home?

At this point, COVID, at least in my eyes, has moved into a different less deadly status. Yes, it still can be deadly for a very small portion of the population but for anyone who has taken the vaccine, that risk is incredibly low. COVID is an unpleasant disease which we should try to avoid. COVID has also become a more manageable disease, less deadly and better treated. Can we change our behaviors to match our new understanding of the disease?